Health care polls leave pols dizzy

You could forgive a typical poll-driven pol for being driven around the bend by health reform.

Legislators hoping to learn what their constituents think about the issue — and how to vote to keep them happy — face a dizzying deluge of hard-to-reconcile data, some of which suggests that voters are more than a little confused, as well.

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What to make of it, for example, when one poll finds that 63 percent think “death panels” are a “distortion” or “scare tactic,” and only 30 percent think the issue is “legitimate,” while another finds that 41 percent believe that people would die because “ government panels” would prevent them from getting the treatment they needed?

Or when one survey finds that 55 percent of Americans support the public option, while another says 79 percent favor one — but also notes that only 37 percent people surveyed actually knew what “public option” meant?

And how to know whether to take any of it seriously when yet another poll finds that 8 percent of likely New Jersey voters say they think President Barack Obama is the Antichrist — and another 13 percent are “not sure”?

Junk polls, some of which offer people cash or prizes to participate in Internet surveys, are part of the problem, as are polls that are conducted on behalf of interest groups seeking to push favorable data into the debate, experts say.

But even without those, there are still plenty of head-scratchers in the mix.

Indeed, public opinion on health care reform sounds a lot like the views of Fannee Doolee, the character from the children’s TV show “ZOOM,” who liked sweets but didn’t like candy; liked bees, but didn’t like bugs. Americans, the polls suggest, like Medicare but not government-run health care; they like choices but aren’t sure they want another option. Finding the common thread is, to say the least, a challenge.

“It reflects a lot of uncertainty on the part of the public,” says Darrell M. West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “It’s hard for voters to figure out what’s going on, because members of Congress haven’t resolved the key issues. And so this creates problems for the pollsters, in the sense that you can get very different results depending on how you ask the question.”

“It’s the epitome of hypotheticals. Or maybe I should say the tyranny of hypotheticals,” he adds.

The surveys are seemingly so sensitive that sometimes one word can spark charges of bias.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office recently griped about an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that asked whether Americans favor a public option that would compete with private insurance companies, rather than asking how important they felt it was to have the “choice” between a public option and private insurance, as they had before.

The wording tweak left the impression that support for the public option had dropped from 76 percent to 43 percent since June, critics argued.

Others have complained about a New York Times/CBS News poll that used a word with positive associations — “Medicare” — to describe the public option.

And an ABC News summary of the results of eight polls from late July through mid-August on “the public option” found that support for a public option ranged from 43 percent to 66 percent.